Wednesday, January 16, 2013

A thousand protesters showed up at the State of the State last Thursday, but Cuomo didn't mention fracking.

In a letter to the Joint Landowners Coalition of New York last week, DEC chief Joseph Martens sought to assuage fears among the pro-fracking lobby that Cuomo would keep the moratorium in place. Martens said that the governor — who received $150,000 of the roughly $200,000 in campaign contributions that energy firms made in the last gubernatorial election — had personally asked him to reach out to the group.
“We’ve just hit walls with a lot of our municipal governments,” said Isaac Silberman-Gorn, an activist with the anti-fracking group Citizen Action in New York’s Southern Tier, a region very much on the gas industry’s radar. “The reason being: They’re bought and paid for.

Fracking is a toxic threat to American communities and the climate. It squanders prodigious quantities of our most precious resource, water.
Furthermore, it is likely, although it is hard to gain the fracking industry's cooperation in proving, that over time fracking water and toxic chemicals seep through the earth's substrata, poisoning groundwater and aquifers, and even returning to the surface, where they pollute and permanently befoul--not just surface water--but all the surrounding acreage.
This exploitation of the planet and wanton destruction of irreplaceable resources can no longer be tolerated.
Now we know. Fracking far exceeds the limits of sustainable practices, even without considering the impact of the methane being extracted for burning.
People are responsible for guarding resources for future generations. Fracking is a wanton violation of this principle.
Allowing fracked gas exports would dramatically increase the scale of and demand for fracking in the United States by giving the fossil fuel industry access to huge foreign markets.
Furthermore, these exports would profit the fracking companies at the expense of everyone else.
Fracking for export is unwise, unjust and untenable.
Stand up to the fossil fuel industry and deny all applications to export natural gas.

Friday, January 11, 2013

How did the conservative movement become so well-organized and entrenched, with think tanks, networks, media, deep pockets?

It didn't happen by chance.

Although there was an organized attempt by conservatives to push back against FDR and the New Deal, it wasn't until The Powell Memo that the conservative movement as we know it gained the impetus to the growth and influence we see today. PowellMemorandumPrinted.pdf (application/pdf Object)